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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR in this sense: “the wheele is come full circled I am heere.”” Thus in line with Sidney’s and Cicero’s description of the function of tragic stories about princes, I claim that the plays epitomize the theatrical understanding of “mirrors of governance,” a term which in this case is not used as a generic label but rather as a metaphor describing an assumed Early Modern interpretive attitude which promoted theoretical thinking. Through the lens of character criticism, which studies literary characters “as individuals worthy of close scrutiny and strong feelings of identification,”* one might argue that the protagonists of all three plays develop by having similar experiences. Because they fall for the flattery of morally evil characters, these monarchs lose their royal dignity and wealth and end up as beggars, only to realize their own folly. After they recognize their failures, some sort of recovery takes place, which means the full restoration to power in Magnyfycence and The Chronicle Historie but only a temporary improvement in the mental state of the monarch in the case of Shakespeare’s King Lear. In this respect, the most significant difference between the three characters is that the stories of Magnyfycence and Leir have a happy outcome, whereas Lear dies in the end. This feature makes King Lear a tragic work in the Early Modern sense, because it tells a story of an illustrious person whose fate turned from prosperity to misfortune, which finally leads to his death, or in Puttenham’s wording, it sets forth “the dolefull falles of infortunate & afflicted Princes.”*! Nevertheless, in all the three plays, the main reason for the change in the monarchs’ fortunes is that they are taken in by flattery. In Aristotelian terms, this tragic mistake is called “hamartia” (Poetics 1453a10/15) or the “tragic error,” meaning “a wrong action committed in ignorance of its nature, effect etc., which is the starting point of causally connected train of events ending in disaster.”®? However, the three plays differ significantly in the manner in which they present the various forms of flattery ultimately leading to the protagonist’s fall from power. In Magnyfycence, the first example of the deceptive force of flattery comes just after the entrance of the allegorical figure of Fansy, who in the guise of Largess overtly praises the monarch’s nobility®* and gains entrance into the royal palace as a sign of having been taken into his Magnyfycence’s good graces. Then Crafty Conveyance overtly reveals his intentions to the audience by saying, “Full moche flatery and falsehode I hyde / And by crafty ” Ibid., sig. L2r. #0 Christy Desmet: Character Criticism, in Stanley Wells — Lena Cowen Orlin (eds.): Shakespeare. An Oxford Guide, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 2003, 351. 81 Puttenham: The Arte, 20. Jan Marteen Bremer’s explanation of the term is quoted in Derek N.C. Wood: Aristotle and Milton’s Poetics, in Heinrich F. Plett (ed.): Renaissance—Poetik, Berlin—New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1994, 369. 8 Skelton: Magnyfycence, lines 375-384. + 28 +
